The Rest is History
WHITFIELD, STEPHEN J.
The Rest Is History In Search of History: A Personal Adventure By Theodore H. White Harper & Row. 561 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies,...
...In Search of History ends in 1963, when after the assassination of her husband a grieving Jacqueline Kennedy asks the journalist to introduce into general circulation her metaphor of Camelot...
...Here the epilogue to White's book is not only poignant but noteworthy...
...He got it back, but he protected his career by self-censorship, writing nothing further about China from 1954 until 1972...
...Kennedy was the hero of the saga of e pluribus unmn because he defeated the ghost of Al Smith and offered hope to American Negroes...
...He was lucky, for never in modern politics had heroic possibilities been so lavishly embodied in one candidate...
...and for that shirking I am now ashamed...
...Mark Twain's favorite was Joan of Arc...
...The last remaining shops are boarded up, the old Hebrew school has been vandalized...
...It cannot be briefly or easily summarized, being nothing less than the maturing American character—as it is tested abroad in the exercise of power, as it is formed at home out of ethnic and religious diversity...
...Human conduct, he concludes, has been animated by ideas more than force...
...In Search of History offers a harrowing reminder of the cruelty and agony of those years...
...Though the attempt to fathom the meaning of his career through the invocation of history is strained, White's autobiography in fact has a far more congenial and resonant theme...
...His religious education was so effective that "even now, when a Biblical phrase runs through my mind, 1 am trapped and annoyed unless I can convert it into Hebrew...
...This approach actually short-circuits historical understanding...
...In the 1950s White was often under suspicion as the messenger who had brought bad news from Asia, and the passport of this crack foreign correspondent was lifted...
...The special insignia of White's writing has long been the evocation of sympathy...
...History has intervened to rob memory of its very matrix...
...Even in The Making of the President I960, the author could not keep the Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, in the villain's role he had assigned to him...
...His idea of history, moreover, is too dependent upon facile analogies—describing events as the most momentous since Waterloo, or since the Gracchi...
...His first books made intelligible the Communist revolution in China and the reconstruction of Europe...
...his mother broke another mold by always voting Republican...
...What a lifetime in journalism has taught Theodore White is that the rest, as they say, is history...
...Even White sensed that something was wrong...
...The Depression, coupled with his father's death, drove the family on home relief...
...His reminiscences of the Communist leaders, on the verge of triumph, are brisk and even affectionate...
...Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Assistant Professor of American Studies, Brandeis University This frisky autobiography renews the necessity to take serious account of Theodore White's work and the personality that shaped it...
...He won early fame as a foreign correspondent when that role could still be invested with romantic glory...
...The result is a minor classic of American autobiography...
...But he has tended to inflate the natural fondness reporters have for most of the politicians they cover, and In Search of History also wraps the mantle of genius much too frequently around the mortals whose friendships he cultivated...
...It vibrates with the themes most characteristic of national self-discovery, recording the passage from obscurity and poverty to the close observation of power, from facts to ideas, from promise to fulfillment and then to perplexity...
...It is not without cause that I. F. Stone, after noting some oleaginous passages from White's book on the 1964 campaign, commented that "a writer who can be so universally admiring need never lunch alone...
...Born in a Boston ghetto in 1915, White picked up both Yiddish and socialism at home...
...The autobiography is similarly free of rancor...
...The house in which the autobiographer was born has had its windows smashed, and overlooks a junkyard instead of the flower garden the boy once knew...
...During his foreign correspondent days, White had recorded how the combustible ingredients of power and innocence led to political failure in China, yet to economic success in Europe...
...White later earned a Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the President 1960 with a display of storytelling so compelling that John F. Kennedy told him: "I couldn't put it down...
...Almost everyone—Chou and Claire Chennault, Luce and Douglas MacArthur, not to mention the residents of New York —is washed in authorial good will...
...On scholarship at Harvard, White by accident encountered Chinese history, and by luck became one of John Fairbank's first students...
...in Kennedy's presence White suspended disbelief...
...White then decided to write about a Presidential campaign in storybook terms—of triumph over adversity, of decision amid a sea of troubles...
...His beat was portentous: the desperation of the peasantry and the expulsion of the Japanese, famine in Honan and revolution in Yenan...
...He returns in 1976 to his old neighborhood in Dorchester, still impoverished but now black...
...Like the nation itself, White had propelled himself so furiously into the immediacy of the present that the past could no longer he recovered...
...The nasti-ness of McCarthyism is shown in miniature in this autobiography, which is enhanced by White's own honesty: "I deliberately ignored the dynamics of foreign policy and defense because too much danger lurked there...
...White got along somewhat better with the men he covered, like Chou En-lai and Joseph Stilwell, than with his own boss, Henry Luce, whose different assessment of Chiang Kai-shek provoked White to leave Timeaher the popular success of Thunder Out of China...
...Unable to write about Gerry Ford and Jimmy Carter, the reporter decided to write about himself...
...It is not accidental, however, that the author consistently misspells ideologue...
...But the sequels were received less warmly, finally with boredom, as the formula became familiar and the author's lack of detachment more troublesome...
...After graduation in 1938, a fellowship drew him to China, where he became Far Eastern correspondent for Time...
...His immigrant father had become a lawyer without ascending into the middle class...
...White shows once again how the vin-dictiveness, treachery, corruption, and indifference of the Nationalist government reaped the whirlwind of a more systematic tyranny that promised to end hunger and disorder...
...Authors are notoriously bad judges of their own work...
...To heighten the suspense, he needed a hero...
...it should have been demolished four decades ago, when Mencken called the abdication of Edward VIII the biggest story since the Resurrection...
...and Teddy was introduced to journalism by hawking newspapers for 10 hours a day on the trolleys...
...had to find out who won...
...On his return, he has been fascinated by the capacity of the public culture to accommodate itself to a polyglot people...
...the title of his memoir underscores his belief in the deeper perspectives available from studying the past...
...For his own sense of politics remains rooted in camaraderie rather than causes, and in attributing to politicians ideas that are really only mental gestures, White once again exaggerates the importance of the men he has covered...
...And the demise of Collier's, the magazine White served as national political correspondent, is made into a saddening memento mori...
...Instead he wrote a couple of novels, including The Mountain Road, in his view his best book...
Vol. 61 • October 1978 • No. 21
